Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

Carl Sagan popularized the phrase “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE), in his 1979 book “Broca’s Brain” and the Cosmos television mini-series in 1980.  Sagan was drawing on previous use of the concept by Marcello Truzzi in the 1970s, Thomas Jefferson and Pierre-Simon LaPlace in the early 1800s, and ultimately by philosopher David Hume in his 1748 essay “On Miracles”. 

 

“Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence”
Carl Sagan, 1979

To make sense of the aphorism, we should first ask what qualifies as an extraordinary claim.  There are three classes of extraordinary claims:

• Statistically improbable claims.
• Claims outside the range of prior experience, with unknown probability.
• Claims contrary to the body of established scientific knowledge or preponderance of existing evidence.

Religious ideas are of the third kind, assertions that are contrary to established scientific knowledge.  (I will discuss other kinds of extraordinary claims and evidence in my science blog.)  Religious or spiritual claims are closer to Hume’s original idea about extraordinary claims in 1748 than the other kinds of extraordinary claims.  

                        “What is a miracle?”
                        “A miracle is something that happens contrawise to the will of nature.”
                                            Source is forgotten, likely to be Robert Heinlein or A.C. Clarke

Social scientist Marcello Truzzi, who founded an organization to investigate paranormal claims, coined a similar wording of the ECREE aphorism that Sagan later used.  In 1978, Truzzi wrote, “extraordinariness must be measured against theoretical expectations provided by the general body of scientific knowledge at the time...claims require extraordinary evidence if they entail the falsehood of established scientific results that are themselves extensively tested and well understood.... A black swan is one thing; a swan that visits you from beyond the grave is something else.”

Religious Claims
Let’s try to summarize religious and spiritual claims.  It won’t be easy.  There are about 3000 distinct religions followed by some group of people, now or in the past.  From this variety, it may be difficult to compile a simple list of religious claims, but I will try, using parallel ideas in a number of religions.  

God and Gods, each having many of the following characteristics:
    Non-corporeal, invisible, silent spirits.
    Immortal.
    Capable of magic or miracles.
    Interested in humanity.
    Intervening in human affairs.
    Responsible for creation of the world, or parts thereof.
    Often engaged in conflict with other gods, spirits, or beings.
    Protecting humans from evil spirits, people or natural disasters, often in exchange for worship.
    All-powerful.
    All-knowing.
    All-good. (In some traditions, not all.)
    
Divine Creation of the World
    Creation of the universe or world by gods or other spiritual beings.
    Creation of the living world.
    Distinct creation of people, separately and above the living world, and endowment of people with sentience, knowledge or wisdom.
    Creation of the spiritual realm, of heaven and hell.

Sacred Gifts
    Gifts of knowledge or other gifts to humanity, including positive and negative gifts.

Immortal Souls
    Spiritual, immortal extension of the human self, capable of existing without the body after death.
    Includes self-awareness, memory, will, thoughts and emotions.
    Generally believed to travel to non-material spiritual places after death -- Heaven, Hell, Limbo, Valhalla, Folkvangr, the seven Samaawat, Alma d-Nhura, Deva Loka, Narka Loka, etc.

Human Spirits
    Ghosts existing after life in the physical world (but not necessarily immortal).  May include malevolent spirits.

Divine Superior Beings
    Demi-gods, including Jesus, Maui, and Heracles, and divine relatives, including the Virgin Mary.  Often considered the offspring of god or gods, sometimes through parthenogenesis, sometimes the offspring of humans and gods.  Often believed to have a previous physical life, but currently are non-corporeal spirits.  Prayer for intercession is often directed toward divine superior beings rather than to God.

Spiritual Superior Beings
    Angels, demons, animal or natural spirits with greater magical power than humans or human spirits.
    May include antagonistic spirits such as Satan.

Afterlife Places
    Heaven, limbo and hell.  Places without a physical presence or contact with the physical world, where one can meet people from one's former life.

Miracles
    Extraordinary events, contrary to expected behavior of natural systems, generally for the benefit of people experiencing difficulty.

Divine Causation
    Routine natural events, seasons, tides, eclipses.
    Routine human events, birth, death.
    Movement of heavenly bodies.
    Extraordinary events as reward or punishment (usually punishment), including natural disasters, virgin birth, ascension to heaven.

Natural Spirits
    Attribution of living identity, will or sentience to animals, plants, places and objects; anthropomorphism of nature.  

Sacred Places
    Attribution of sacred living identity to mountains, rivers, and lands.  Sacred objects and places are believed to enable religious miracles.     

Spiritual Inanimate Objects and Places
    Religious icons, relics of saints, churches, temples, springs and objects or places believed to have magical powers or enable miracles.

Reincarnation
    The belief that souls are recycled into new people or animals.  Some religions attribute a “leveling-up” process of attaining higher or lower status according to moral behavior during life.

Divination and Prophecy
    Belief that the future can be determined by religious ritual or by religiously endowed individuals. 

Saints and Spiritual Intermediaries
    Belief that the spirits of sacred humans can intervene and influence God’s actions, or parallel beliefs in non-Christian religions.

Sacred Texts
    Belief that the Bible, Devi Bhagavatam, Quran, Book of Mormon or other sacred texts are divinely inspired, contain divine revelation, are literally true, and have an absolute obligation to be obeyed.
    
Prayer
    The belief that humans can communicate with gods and higher beings, to give thanks and ask for divine help.

Ancestor Worship
    Belief that deceased ancestors actively intervene and protect their descendants.

Human Religious Intermediaries Priests, Pastors, Popes, and Shamen
    Belief that special humans possess magical powers or can intervene to influence divine action.

Divine Humans
    Egyptian, Roman and Japanese societies held that their leaders were gods, or became gods when assuming office as emperor or pharaoh.  Chinese and other cultures believed that their leaders were semi-divine descendants of gods.

Belief in Transcendent Reality, and/or denial of physical reality.
    Belief that physical reality is corrupt and is superseded by a transcendent reality.

Karma
    Belief that good or bad actions have real-world consequences in luck or future events.

Ordinary Scientific Evidence

The scientific method systemized the search for truth and standardized the criteria for truth, beginning in the 17th century.  Scientific evidence involves the following elements.

• Empirical observation.
• Identification of processes and developing hypotheses about processes.
• Experiments designed to fulfill predictions or invalidate the hypotheses.
• Clarity of data from experiment.
• Repeatability.
• Relevance of evidence, often measured by statistical tests.
• Peer review and publication.

In general, religious claims fail most or all of the standards for scientific truth (or as it is otherwise known, truth).  Stories of 14th century BCE conversations with a burning bush or visions by a 15th-century French girl do not qualify as evidence.

 
Moses and the Burning Bush, Holman Bible, 1890

Vision of Joan of Arc (1428), artist and date unknown to me.

With religious claims, there are few repeatable observations with objective observers.  There are no identified processes.  There are no experiments to invalidate the claims.  There is little clarity of the data.  There is often little relevance of the evidence, and little critique of the claims.  We see that religious claims fail to meet standards for ordinary evidence before even considering the need for extraordinary evidence,

Why Are Religious Claims Extraordinary Claims?
Religious claims are extraordinary claims because they violate known scientific knowledge about processes.  The list of religious claims is too long for a complete rebuttal, but fall into four general categories.  First are claims involving spirits, second are claims involving higher classes of beings, third are claims involving miracles and fourth are claims of future knowledge or predestination.

Spirits represent disembodied beings, with self-awareness, memory, will, ability to communicate and other powers.  But scientific knowledge places the seat of sentience in the brain.  Through observation of patients with brain injuries (as described well in the books by Oliver Sachs) we know which parts of the brain enable these aspects of sentience.  We can observe patients in which memory, will and communication are gone, and have established that the brain performs those functions of humanity.  Without a physical brain, spirits cannot have sentience; souls cannot persist after death.  To claim otherwise is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence.  

The same reasoning applies to the existence of higher beings, gods, demi-gods, angels and demons that are believed to exist in the spiritual world.  Without a brain, how do they think?  How do they persist as self-aware entities?  To claim that an angel or demon possesses sentience without a brain violates our scientific understanding of sentience.

Religious claims of miracles and magic are also extraordinary claims.  We know how physics, chemistry, and life sciences work.  A miraculous event, by definition, is contrary to the expectations from those natural processes.  As such, every miracle or magical claim requires extraordinary evidence.

Claims of prophecy and predestination violate the scientific understanding of time.  In all well-documented experience, information can not flow backwards through time.  Future events are fundamentally uncertain, despite high precision in prior conditions and known processes.

Extraordinary Evidence
What is extraordinary evidence, as compared to the normal scientific evidence described above?  

I return to David Hume, who first established the ECREE standard in 1748.  “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish”.  

In essence evidence of a miraculous event must be strong enough to invalidate the scientific knowledge precluding that event.  To be considered true, a miracle involving levitation must be supported by evidence sufficient to invalidate our well-established notions about gravity.  To be considered true, the claim of a soul, ghost or spirit must demonstrate disembodied sentience in some unquestionable, observable, repeatable form.  The claim that God exists needs to be demonstrated by apparently unlimited power – perhaps by moving thousands of galaxies overnight to spell out, “I am God” in every language on earth.  Of course, none of those things have ever happened or ever will happen.

Conclusion
Religious claims are extraordinary claims, defying our existing body of scientific knowledge.  Religious claims fail to meet even the lowest standards of scientific evidence, much less the extraordinary evidence required for such claims to be regarded as truth.  
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Afterword
Non-Religious Paranormal Beliefs
There are also a substantial number of non-religious paranormal beliefs, some of which overlap with religious beliefs.  Some (telekinesis, telepathy, extraterrestrial visitors) do not involve spiritual elements, while others (ghosts) do not involve higher spiritual powers.  These also require extraordinary evidence, but are irrelevant to the discussion of atheism.

Non-Interventionist God
Albert Einstein said, "I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist... I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings”  The Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) framed a special case of the non-interventionist God.  Spinoza held to a physical sense of reality, but viewed all of creation as a sub-set of God.  According to commentator Paul So, Spinoza “rejected the existence of Soul, Angels, Demons, Miracles, Divine Creationism, the possibility of Afterlife, Divine Revelation, validity of Prophecy, Biblical literalism, Tradition, Scriptural authority, and last but not least the existence of a personal God.”

Giordano Bruno in the 16th century rejected many of these same religious claims, while introducing revolutionary speculative cosmological ideas that are today held as true.  He speculated that stars were far-away suns, that planets might orbit those suns, and that intelligent beings might live there.  He also made contributions to the study of memory, mathematics, geometry and language.  Bruno may have been approaching the rationalist’s idea of a non-interventionist God, but was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600.

Giardano Bruno, 1548-1600, portrait from 1830 biography.

Execution of Giardano Bruno, source unknown to me.

Spinoza’s non-interventionist God eliminates most, but not all, of the unsupported religious claims.  Spinoza’s God presumes that God is the creator; that God is reality, and that God is greater than reality.  These claims are also unsupported by evidence. 

Baruch Spinoza, 1632 - 1677.

Spinoza tried to rationalize religion by removing the most fantastic claims, and altering the definition of God to equate God with our observed reality.  But God is unnecessary to explain our observations, and equating God with reality brings no additional understanding.  There’s also no evidence, extraordinary or otherwise, that God is greater than our reality.  The central claim that God exists is completely unsupported.  According to Occam’s razor, the best explanation of our reality is that God does not exist.

Does a Virus Have a Soul?

"You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

--  Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994)

Attungauruk

Watercolor by Inupiaq artist Ken Lisbourne, of Point Hope, Alaska.  

The scene shows the funeral of an Inupiaq chief, about 1880.  The soul of the chief rises up to heaven while his         seven wives, elderly parents, friends and Russian Orthodox priest grieve by his gravesite.

The Soul

The concept of a human soul is in many ways central to religion.  The question of whether other living things have a soul addresses the “special” status of humans as the purpose of God’s creation.  The soul is a discrete entity – it exists or it doesn’t exist.  We can’t say that a chimpanzee has 96% of a soul.  But when we look at our evolutionary history or at the range of self-awareness in the human species there is no easily defined boundary. 

Francis Crick (of DNA discovery fame) wrote a book, “The Amazing Hypothesis”.   I only read it about half-way through; I got the point quickly and was done.   In Crick’s view, there is no evidence for an essence of life beyond our physical bodies and minds, and no need for such an explanation of human life.

I’ll start with the question that I asked the teacher in my church confirmation class, when I was twelve or thirteen years old.   “Does a virus have a soul?”  

As I dimly recall, my thinking at the time was that if I had a soul, my parents also had souls.  And my grandparents, great-great-great-great grandparents, to cave-people, to proto-human apes, to early mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, etc.  Where do you draw the line between what living thing has a soul and what does not?

Does a Virus Have a Soul?

I don’t remember how my teacher answered the question, but I remember thinking that his answer wasn’t very convincing.  A virus, after all, can be crystallized in the lab like a mineral, then dissolved and continue replicating itself when allowed to infect a cell.  But humanity is in an unbroken evolutionary chain with viruses, and amoebas, starfish and oak trees, horseshoe crabs, moss and lichens.  We share a large percentage of our DNA with oak trees.  So the question, in stealth form, is whether humans have a soul, or whether each living cell has a soul. 

In a traditional view, we would presume that all humans have a soul (although I have my doubts about some of them).  But let’s consider our heredity.  Homo Sapiens interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, presumably they also had souls.   Homo Habilis made tools 1.5 million years ago; perhaps those humans have an immortal soul.  And so on, back through our lineage to our cousins the chimpanzees (98% human DNA) and fruit flies (47% human DNA), wine grapes (24% human DNA) to stromatolites and algae (7 % human DNA).   Where do we draw the line among our ancestors and cousins, between those who possess souls and those that do not?  Can we say that a grape plant has 24% of a soul?

I think this issue is why the topic of evolution is so uncomfortable to Christians.  I think Christians are generally uncomfortable with the idea of sharing heaven with flatworms. 

It is also useful to remember that we are colonial creatures, as much as a stromatolite or coral.  Each of our cells is an individual creature which lives and dies, while only the collective entity has consciousness. Does a cell have a soul?  

Subdividing further to a lower level, each cell lives in symbiosis with mitochondria, which were eaten long ago by the ancestors of our cells.  Mitochondria resisted digestion and continued life, first as a parasite and then as a partner of the larger cell.  Does a mitochondrion have a soul?  What part of a person has a soul?   Also, consider that we are not only descended from apes, but also from viruses.  Various retroviruses infected our ancestors and left segments of DNA which now reproduce with humans.  Some of that DNA is functional and contributes to who we are as humans.  Does the viral part of a human have a soul, and did the viral ancestors of humans have souls?  Did the virus ancestors of humans have part of a soul?

It seems to me that there is a conflict between the idea of the soul as the discrete, eternal entity of human self and our evolutionary history.  Our history shows we are a patchwork of biology.  We are connected in an unbroken lineage to much simpler forms of life.  It is unclear where we should draw the line between beings which have a human soul and those that do not.

The Soul as the Source of Free Will

Perhaps the soul is the unit of life that is capable of judgment, exercising free will and making decisions of right and wrong.  Very well then, but this excludes humans who are born with a birth defect, leaving only the brain stem and lower functions; life, but no possibility of thought or deliberate action.  Can some humans be born without a soul?  Do we conclude that these children of humans are excluded from heaven because they have no soul?  

I know a young woman who is mentally impaired.   The Catholic Church excludes her from communion, because they believe she cannot understand salvation.  She talks, she sometimes works at McDonalds, she calls my wife on the telephone – would anyone say she has no soul?  Although she cannot read, she is compassionate, empathetic and caring.   It is clear to me that she has more of a soul than many others in our midst.

Where is the Soul?
        Plato, in Phaedo, circa 430 BCE: 

            Simmias replied:
            "And is [death] anything but the separation of soul and body? And being
            dead is the attainment of this separation; when the soul exists in
            herself, and is parted from the body and the body is parted from the
            soul-that is death?”
            Cebes answered, “But in what relates to the soul, men are apt to be incredulous
            they fear that when she leaves the body her place may be nowhere,
            and that on the very day of death she may be destroyed and perish-immediately
            on her release from the body, issuing forth like smoke or air and
            vanishing away into nothingness?....much persuasion and many arguments are required in
            order to prove that when the man is dead the soul yet exists, and has any force of
            intelligence."

I'm astonished that our understanding of the human soul has not progressed in over 24 centuries.

The soul is inextricably tied to the idea of self.  The self includes certain essential features, without which it cannot exist: memory, will, self-awareness, thoughts and emotions.  These are the things that define us as a person.  Thanks to these aspects of consciousness, when we awake in the morning, we know we are the same person who went to bed the night before.  Modern neuroscience, using tools like functional MRI, has shown us where each of these capabilities exists in the brain.  This knowledge was also partly revealed through the study of unfortunate individuals who have lost part of the self through some kind of brain trauma.  Dr. Oliver Sacks illustrated these cases in a brilliant series of popular books.  The functional aspect of the self in living people is inextricably tied to specific functional aspects of the brain, without which the self does not exist.  

 Death's Door, William Blake, 1805.

Consider the situation of many Alzheimer’s patients.  Degradation of the brain due to age and disease reduces and eventually destroys the elements of the self.  Memory, will, self-awareness, thoughts and emotions gradually diminish and disappear.  We might look at a patient and say that the soul has departed, long before death of the body.  But at what point did the soul depart?  Can the soul disappear in tiny drops, leaving a partial soul behind?  Again, we have the fundamental discrepancy between the theoretical indivisibility of the soul, and the diminished shards we experience in real life.

When the mechanisms of the self shut down, as they must at death, what remains?  Can a soul exist without memory, without will, self-awareness, thoughts or emotions?  When the brain dies, carrying all of the attributes of the self, how can the soul persist?  If we must believe that the entirety of the self is somehow transferred at the moment of death to another, invisible vessel, where is it?  And why should we believe that?  Does this make any sense?

If there is no immortal soul, carrying the self, the good deeds and sins of the individual beyond death, then the traditional ideas of heaven, hell and of God as the final Judge are also void.

Socrates,  in Plato’s Phaedo:
            “And are we to suppose that the soul, which is invisible, in passing
            to the true Hades, which like her is invisible, and pure, and noble,
            and on her way to the good and wise God, whither, if God will, my
            soul is also soon to go-that the soul, I repeat, if this be her nature
            and origin, is blown away and perishes immediately on quitting the
            body as the many say? That can never be, dear Simmias and Cebes.”
            “That soul, I say, herself invisible, departs to the invisible world to
            the divine and immortal and rational: thither arriving, she lives
            in bliss and is released from the error and folly of men, their fears
            and wild passions and all other human ills, and forever dwells, as
            they say of the initiated, in company with the gods. Is not this true,
            Cebes?”

I stand with Cebes in response to Socrates and Plato.  The invisible soul, the invisible, pure, noble and true Hades, the invisible, good and wise God, and the invisible divine, immortal and rational world do not exist.

Fin

The Soul Reluctantly Departing the Body, William Blake.

 Death of a Strong, Wicked Man, William Blake.

The Reunion of the Soul and the Body, William Blake

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The reproduction of the watercolor by Ken Lisbourne is used respectfully, but without permission.  I will remove the image upon request.  I hope that inclusion of the image will promote Ken's outstanding work as an artist.

Images of art by William Blake also used without permission.
Langridge, Irene, 1904, William Blake, A Study of His Life and Art Work

http://www.thalasson.com/books/irene-langridge/william-blake/

Introduction

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”   I Corinthians 13:11

Introduction

It seems that I grew up in church.  In my childhood, three generations of my family attended church together every week.  I attended Sunday School in the morning, and youth fellowship and choir practice Sunday evening, and sang for services at least once a month.  Sometimes I sang with the adult choir, which met on Wednesday nights.  My grandparents were missionaries and my great-grandparents were missionaries; my uncles and cousins were ministers.  I worked on a Boy Scout religious award for a year, including service hours at the church every week.  I was an altar boy.  I read the bible cover-to-cover by age fourteen. I performed in church music productions and knew every nook and cranny of our old, cathedral-like church.

Here is a photo I called "Empty Church", taken decades later.  This was my usual view, from the altar boy's chair.  

But questions nagged at me for my entire life.  Sometime in my late 40s, I stopped going to church.  At age 60, when I described myself as an atheist to a friend, he asked me to write down my reasons.  This blog is the result.  I will consider various aspects of religion and Christianity, such as the soul, prayer, the Bible, God as Creator, Sustainer, and Judge, heaven and hell, and Satan.   I have a few thoughts about the politicization of Christianity.  Through all of this, I will be considering how religious beliefs align with other things we know about the world from science, experience, and observation.  I will ask some peculiar questions, such as whether a virus has a soul, and whether the people on the Titanic forgot to pray.  I’ll consider the problem posed by Steve Martin: “Atheists Don’t Have No Songs”.  I’ll be asking whether religion is good according to my standards of right and wrong.  And most of all, I will ask whether religious belief makes any sense.

I know that religious people are often the happiest people I know.  They often have the clearest sense of family and enjoy the fellowship and affirmation of belonging to a church.  They are able to disregard worries, because they believe that no matter what happens, it will be as God decided.  They have faith that God exists, and that God is good.  So if you choose to read these posts, understand that I will be challenging that belief and that comfortable happiness.

To live in happiness under a falsehood seems wrong to me.   My worldview is now less settled, with the realization that the future of mankind does not depend on an invisible power, but depends on us. 

I have no interest in debate.  I am simply sharing my thoughts, as my friend asked.  I will not read nor respond to comments.